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Literary analysis on oscar wao
Essay on the brief wondrous life of oscar wao
Essay on the brief wondrous life of oscar wao
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Dominican culture to Diaz is sad, funny, deeply rooted in masculinity and sex, family oriented, cursed, tragic, overall, an epic experience that cannot be explained by traditional standards of logic and truth. Diaz’s work is fiction, but that’s not the point. Through fiction and
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is an extraordinary tale that takes you into the lives of Oscar Wao and his family members who are burdened with a terrible curse called fuku. The fuku spell began with Oscar’s grandfather, Abelard. Abelard angered the Dominican Republic dictator, Trujillo, after he allegedly made a joke about the dictator that turned into a crime. However, the real reason behind Abelard’s downfall was his refusal to introduce his daughter to Trujillo, who had a sexual appetite for young women.
Life in the Dominican during the dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina was as bad as one can expect a dictatorial reign to be, it sucked major ass. Junot Díaz, in his book The Brief and Wondrous life of Oscar Wao, he describes this type of life in the Dominican from the perspective of a boy named Oscar and his upbringing in the Dominican. Diaz also shares different perspectives and upbringings from Oscars family members like his sister, mother, and grandfather during Trujillo’s rule. Instead of presenting a length description of the Trujillo’s dictatorship and the events that transpired during his rule, Díaz tells a story of a family and their experiences in the Dominican to give a sense of how his rule effected people’s daily lives
According to the Oxford American Dictionary, a bildungsroman is “a novel dealing with one person 's formative years or spiritual education.” In an interview with Slate.com, Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and creative writing professor at MIT, and author of The Brief and Wondrous life of Oscar Wao, describes his book as a “textual Caribbean”(O’Rourke). He elaborates on his statement by saying how the work was supposed to be, “Shattered and yet somehow holding together” (O’Rourke). He embeds this concept of a textual Caribbean in The Brief and Wondrous life of Oscar Wao through the theme that disjointed occurrences eventually breed clarified understanding. Given the genre of this book as a bildungsroman, Diaz makes evidence for the preceding theme through the epiphanic encounters of the following two characters in The Brief and Wondrous life of Oscar Wao: Oscar and Beli.
There’s a direct relationship between the canefields and violence in the book, there had to be a reason for this. The canefields in the Dominican Republic was where the slaves worked when the Spanish colonizers came to the country, they were the cotton fields of the Dominican Republic. This is also when the fuku, or curse, was brought over the Dominican Republic from Europe as the narrator claims. ”It is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fuku on the world, and we’ve all been in the shit ever since” (page 1). This must mean that canefields are part of the fuku the Europeans brought along.
“The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” written by Junot Daz, gifts us a profound tale of heartbreak and weakness but also persistence and resilience. It tells the story of Oscar de León, a Dominican-American boy who dreams of becoming a great writer and finding love despite being an overweight, nerdy, and socially awkward outlier from his peers. The novel interweaves Oscar’s life with the history of his family and the Dominican Republic, particularly focusing on the curse known as the fuk, which has plagued his family for generations. Daz shifts the narrative between different periods of time and perspectives to explore themes of identity, love, destiny, the supernatural, and the impact of history and tyranny. In chapters three and four, we
In the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, the Dominican culture is told through a stereotypical Dominican named Yunior. As stated in the title, the novel discusses Oscar Wao’s brief life through his family’s curse called Fukú. The history of his family is presented through their downfalls in love, which overtime accumulates into a burden for Oscar to experience the same events his family members had once experienced. This Fukú that has been lurking within the Cabral family’s history from the Dominican Republic to the United States is commonly found through dysfunctional relationships between men and women. The known concept in relationships called love transforms into a corrupted power source for abuse based on the
In his book, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz explores themes of racial and national identity while also examining stereotypes of masculinity. The book is centered around a curse known as fuku that haunts the protagonist of the book, Oscar. Dominican values encompass the life that Oscar tries to live ultimately leading to his depression. Wao can be a parallel to the culture seen today where everyone desires to fit in.
The Brief Wondrous life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz explores Latin culture in depth from various perspectives. This novel discusses deep concepts surrounding Dominican culture such as love, sex, fuku, gender, and power that shape the characters throughout the novel. These themes alter the way the culture functions and influences the youth into following these stereotypes. Gender, masculinity, and power are very prominent in the novel and often define the character for who he/she is. While the protagonist in this novel is Oscar de Leon, this story is mainly about how this culture and Oscar’s story has formed the narrator, Yunior, into becoming who he is at the end of the novel.
“The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” is a story that revolves around relationships. Obviously some of these relationships are between the main character and his/her counterparts, or family, or even opponents, but this book’s author would not dare make it so simple. Junot Diaz is known for venturing far outside the organization of storytelling and he makes no exception for “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” Thus, Diaz allows his characters to develop relationships with outside or real life parties, such as another entertainment franchise, modern world government, or even the book’s narrator.
In the opening page of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao the narrator, Yunior, defines Fukú as “... a curse or a doom of some kind” (1). He exposes us, the reader, to the origin of the Fukú and what it’s capable of doing. He explains that “ anyone who plotted against Trujillo would incur a fukú most powerful, down to the seventh generation and beyond” (3). For Abelard and his family that was the case, the Fukú affected them so far for three generations. The effect of the Fukú could be seen first with when Abelard was imprisoned, then Beli’s miscarriage, and lastly the killing of Oscar.
Beli Getting Pregnant The Brief Life Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a novel written by Junot Diaz, a Dominican writer. The novel, that was written in 2007, is about Oscar and his family’s experiences. It also differentiates race and gender in the Dominican Republic.
New York Times Best-seller, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz tells the captivating life story of Oscar, a sweet but embarrassingly awkward, overweight boy. Oscar Wao’s story is one that talks about life’s impending dooms, the kind that trace back generations and are rooted in superstition. Dominican-born but New Jersey raised, if there is at least one thing that believes in Oscar it’s the Fukú, a curse that all who are Dominican are familiar with in one form or another, and whose presence Oscar has felt since the end of his young “baller,” days-back when he had not only one girl but two. Oscar’s inability to decide between his two “girlfriends,” Maritza and Olga, is what ultimately led to him losing the interest of both girls and, he believes, is what led to him being such an undesirable geek from the age of seven and on.
Junot Díaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao expresses different characteristics of the Dominican Republic’s culture pinpointing the era of Rafael Trujillo. The novel is narrated by Yunior a self-centered player, but mainly focuses on Oscar Wao, a complete nerd who struggles with self- confidence and facing the pressures of manhood. Oscar Wao is not understood by his Dominican family. The novel also goes in depth about the different backgrounds of Oscar’s family members, while centralizing in many themes such as white supremacy, fuku and zafa, decolonial love and culture, all of which were impacted by the era of Trujillo.
In the novel The Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz and in the film Stranger Than Fiction the audience encounters two heros, Oscar Wao and Harold Crick. Throughout the lives of both heros I identified similarities and differences in the characteristics of each that make them their own unique hero. In Oscar’s life, he seeks for love and for someone to love him back, which he has a difficult time accomplishing. Whereas in Harold's story, he attempts to determine who is writing his story so he can prevent them from ending his life. Both heros, Oscar and Harold, proceed on journeys that determine their fate.
